President Obama's OFA has Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton echoes

President Barack Obama’s decision to transform his campaign into the freestanding lobbying group “Organizing for Action” is groundbreaking in many ways — but the idea of creating an outside organization to put pressure on Capitol Hill dates back at least to Ronald Reagan.

President Bill Clinton even tried to create one 20 years ago. In 1993, seeking to to marshal grassroots support for his health-care reform effort, his team’s first impulse was to set up a standalone entity that could anonymously raise and spend large sums of money on polling, petition drives, phone banks and TV commercials.

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Obama’s got big plans for OFA, and the group’s leaders are heavy on ambition for what they’ll be able to do to make the president’s agenda on issues like gun control and immigration a reality. But while campaign finance laws have changed over the years, some of the same problems — in both the law and public perception — that hounded previous White House-connected outside influence efforts could lay ahead for Obama. And, so far, neither the White House nor OFA is saying much about how they plan to avoid them.

By June 1993, “The National Health Care Campaign” to support Clinton’s health plan was up and running with 27 staffers in a downtown Washington office, funded by $100,000 in seed money from the Democratic National Committee, according to a Washington Post article at the time. The group’s goal: raise up to $37 million in large chunks from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

But the group came under attack over ethical questions about how an entity so closely connected to the White House would seek large sums of money from business interests that could be dramatically affected by health reform.

As with Obama’s new OFA, the Clinton effort immediately raised questions about what control White House officials would have over the new group’s activities and fundraising. Lawyers in the Clinton White House advised that officials could “pass paper” to the new organization, but could not coordinate with them, the Post reported.

However, the precautions didn’t squelch the critics.

“This is the smelliest ethical thing they’ve done so far,” Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster told Newhouse News at the time. “If you are a pharmaceutical company and you get a call to contribute, it’s kind of hard to say no.”

Critics also disputed the Clinton-era group’s claim to be independent of the DNC.

“We started out as a separate entity and that, itself, became an issue,” recalled Heather Booth, a top organizer for the National Health Care Campaign. “Those who didn’t want health care reform came after us. … It was such an issue that it was decided that it was easier to move it back into the DNC than to waste energy defending it.”

On the same day as the Post’s front-page article, the DNC announced it was reversing course, pulling the plug on the freestanding 501c4 lobbying group, and bringing its work back in house. The effort continued on at the DNC but was ultimately swamped by the insurance industry’s “Harry and Louise” ad campaign, which eventually spent $60 million to defeat Clinton’s plan.

“We didn’t have the money we really needed to do that sort of thing,” Clinton adviser Harold Ickes told POLITICO last week. “I’m not sure [we] moved one vote.”

“We tried to figure out different ways, figure out some external apparatus or support for health reform,” recalled Chris Jennings, one of Clinton’s top health care policy advisers. “It was very tough, as I recall. I don’t know if it was political or policy or legal or some combination.”